Eeyore's News and View

Annual report due for Social Security and Medicare
May 12, 2009 - 11:26am
WASHINGTON (AP) - The financial health of the government's two biggest benefit programs may have slipped over the past year, reflecting the deep recession that has already bitten into other areas of the budget.
The trustees for Social Security and Medicare are scheduled to provide their annual report on the finances of both programs on Tuesday. In advance of the release, many private analysts said they expected both programs could run out of cash sooner than last predicted.
A year ago, the trustees projected that the Social Security trust fund would start paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2017 and that the trust fund would be depleted in 2041.
For the Medicare trust fund, which pays for hospital care, the situation was more urgent. It was projected to start paying more in benefits than it collects in taxes within a year, and the trustees forecast that it would be depleted by 2019.
But many analysts said the worst recession in decades will produce a bleaker forecast for both Social Security and Medicare in the new trustees' report. The downturn has resulted in a loss of 5.7 million payroll jobs since it began in December 2007 and an unemployment rate that hit a 25-year high of 8.9 percent in April.
Fewer people working means less being paid into the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare.
The Congressional Budget Office recently projected that Social Security will collect just $3 billion more in 2010 than it will pay out in benefits. A year ago, the CBO had projected that Social Security would have a much higher $86 billion cash surplus for the 2010 budget year, which begins Oct. 1. The difference in the two estimates is the result of the recession.
While the smaller surplus will not have any impact on Social Security benefit payments, the government will need to borrow more at a time when the federal deficit is already exploding because of the recession and the billions of dollars being spent to prop up a shaky banking system.
For years, the Social Security trust fund has taken in more than it spent on benefits, resulting in a cushion of billions of dollars that the government could spend on other programs while giving the trust fund an IOU.
Even with the big drop in the Social Security surplus, Medicare's condition is more precarious, reflecting the pressures from soaring health care costs as well as the drop in tax collections.
For that reason, President Barack Obama is expected to focus on Medicare before he addresses Social Security.
Obama on Monday praised a pledge by the health care industry to achieve $2 trillion in savings on health care costs over the next decade, but it was unclear how much help those pledges would be in achieving Obama's goal of extending coverage to some 50 million uninsured Americans. The administration is pushing Congress to pass legislation in this area this year, preferring to tackle health care before Social Security.
The trustees report is still expected to set off a heated debate over the government's two large benefit programs, with critics saying it will highlight the failure of the Obama administration to take on the most serious problems in the budget _ soaring entitlement spending, before the retirement of 78 million baby boomers makes the problems even worse.
The administration on Monday revised its deficit forecasts upward to project an imbalance this year of $1.84 trillion, four times last year's record deficit, and said the deficits will remain above $500 billion every year over the next decade.
http://www.wtopnews.com/?sid=1673971&nid=111


Swine flu spreading too fast to count, CDC says
Confirmed cases are only the ‘tip of the iceberg,’ health official says
Swine flu is spreading so far and fast in the U.S. that state health officials may soon stop counting individual cases, a federal health official said Monday.
The novel H1N1 virus accounted for 40 percent of flu viruses logged in the U.S. in the past week and helped propel an uptick in overall flu-like illnesses, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, a deputy director with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I think the cases we’re confirming are the tip of the iceberg here,” Schuchat said in a press briefing Monday.
The CDC has confirmed more than 2,000 cases in 43 states and Washington D.C., with 94 hospitalizations and three deaths. Another 700 cases are suspected. Although the flu is spreading quickly, it remains relatively mild in the U.S., say health officials.
“They tell us for sure this virus is circulating throughout the United States and it’s likely to be in every state,” Schuchat said, adding: “It’s a time when we really need to guard against complacency as we move to a new normal.”
The CDC has started tracking the novel virus using the surveillance system used for seasonal influenza, called FluView.
Because many states did not report cases over the past weekend, Schuchat said she expects a big jump in cases to be reported Tuesday.
So far, three people in the U.S. have died from complications of swine flu. On Saturday, Washington state health officials reported the death of a man in his 30s. America’s other two swine flu deaths — a toddler and a pregnant woman — each suffered from several other illnesses when they were infected with the virus, according to a study released Thursday.
Health officials said the Washington victim had underlying heart conditions and viral pneumonia when he died Thursday from what appeared to be complications from swine flu.
“We’re working with local and federal partners to track this outbreak,” said Washington State Secretary of Health Mary Selecky.
The man was not further identified. He began showing symptoms on April 30, and was treated with anti-viral medication. Dr. Gary Goldbaum, Snohomish Health District medical director, said medical officials hadn’t been able to isolate any “risk factors” for the man to identify where he might have been exposed.
Neighboring Canada reported its first death from swine flu on Friday — a woman who was in her 30s. Alberta's chief medical officer says the woman from northern Alberta and did not travel recently. He says she also had other medical conditions. Dr. Andre Corriveau made the announcement at a news conference Friday.
The report by the CDC presented a clearer picture of the complicated medical situations faced by those who have gotten swine flu and had the most serious cases so far.
The Mexican toddler had a chronic muscle weakness called myasthenia gravis, a heart defect, a swallowing problem and lack of oxygen. Little Miguel Tejada Vazquez fell ill and died during a family visit to Texas.
The pregnant woman, Judy Trunnell, 33, was hospitalized for two weeks until she died Tuesday. The teacher was in a coma, and her baby girl was delivered by cesarean section. According to the report, she had asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, a skin condition called psoriasis and was 35 weeks pregnant.
People with chronic illnesses are at greatest risk for severe illness from the flu, along with the elderly and young children. So far, most of those with the swine flu in the U.S. and Mexico have been young adults.
“We’re still learning about what patients are most at risk” from the new virus, said Dr. Fatima Dawood, a CDC epidemiologist.
The CDC report released by the New England Journal of Medicine also provided more detailed information on 22 people hospitalized with swine flu. Nine had chronic medical conditions, including the two who died and a 25-year-old man with Down syndrome and a congenital heart disease. Five of the patients had asthma alone.
President Barack Obama said Friday that public health agencies must reach all corners of the nation when providing information on matters such as swine flu.
The president dropped by a town hall-style meeting at the White House co-sponsored by the Spanish-language media company Univision.
He said, "we're all in this together. We're one country, we're one community. When one person gets sick, it has the potential of making us all sick."
‘We’re still learning’
Last week, the CDC also described the symptoms experienced by Americans with swine flu. About 90 percent reported fever, 84 percent reported cough and 61 percent reported a sore throat — all similar to what’s seen with seasonal flu. But about one in four cases have also involved either vomiting or diarrhea, which is not typical for the normal flu bug.
It’s possible the virus is spreading not only through coughed and sneezed droplets — as with seasonal flu — but also through feces-contaminated hands, said Dawood.
“This is a new virus and we’re still learning how transmission occurs,” she said.
About 10 percent of the Americans who got swine flu had traveled to Mexico and likely picked up the infection there.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30398682/

The King of Stupid acts, the US is doing, it will kill us and the econmoy soon. Cussword, cussword our politicians are so stupid.
US to borrow 46 cents for every dollar spent
WASHINGTON (AP) - The government will have to borrow nearly 50 cents for every dollar it spends this year, exploding the record federal deficit past $1.8 trillion under new White House estimates. Budget office figures released Monday would add $89 billion to the 2009 red ink - increasing it to more than four times last year's all-time high as the government hands out billions more than expected for people who have lost jobs and takes in less tax revenue from people and companies making less money.
The unprecedented deficit figures flow from the deep recession, the Wall Street bailout and the cost of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus bill - as well as a seemingly embedded structural imbalance between what the government spends and what it takes in.
As the economy performs worse than expected, the deficit for the 2010 budget year beginning in October will worsen by $87 billion to $1.3 trillion, the White House says. The deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps.
Just a few days ago, Obama touted an administration plan to cut $17 billion in wasteful or duplicative programs from the budget next year. The erosion in the deficit announced Monday is five times the size of those savings.
For the current year, the government would borrow 46 cents for every dollar it takes to run the government under the administration's plan. In 2010, it would borrow 35 cents for every dollar spent.
"The deficits ... are driven in large part by the economic crisis inherited by this administration," budget director Peter Orszag wrote in a blog entry on Monday.
The developments come as the White House completes the official release of its $3.6 trillion budget for 2010, adding detail to some of its tax proposals and ideas for producing health care savings. The White House budget is a recommendation to Congress that represents Obama's fiscal and policy vision for the next decade.
Annual deficits would never dip below $500 billion and would total $7.1 trillion over 2010-2019. Even those dismal figures rely on economic projections that are significantly more optimistic - just a 1.2 percent decline in gross domestic product this year and a 3.2 percent growth rate for 2010 - than those of private sector economists and the Congressional Budget Office.
As a percentage of the economy, the measure economists say is most important, the deficit would be 12.9 percent of GDP this year, the biggest since World War II. It would drop to 8.5 percent of GDP in 2010.
In the past three decades, deficits in the range of 4 percent of GDP have caused Congress and previous administrations to launch efforts to narrow the gap. The White House predicts deficits equaling 2.9 percent of the economy within four years.
Polling data suggest Americans are increasingly worried about mounting deficits and debt.
An AP-GfK poll last month gave Obama relatively poor grades on the deficit, with just 49 percent of respondents approving of the president's handling of the issue and 41 percent disapproving. By contrast, Obama's overall approval rating was 64 percent, with just 30 percent disapproving.
"Even using their February economic assumptions - which now appear to be out of date and overly optimistic - the administration never puts us on a stable path," said Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group that advocates budget discipline. "The president ... understands the critical importance of fiscal discipline. Now we need to see some action."
For the most part, Obama's updated budget tracks the 134-page outline he submitted to lawmakers in February. His budget remains a bold but contentious document that proposes higher taxes for the wealthy, a hotly contested effort to combat global warming and the first steps toward guaranteed health care for all.
Meanwhile, the congressional budget plan approved last month would not extend Obama's signature $400 tax credit for most workers - $800 for couples - after it expires at the end of next year.
Obama's "cap-and-trade" proposal to curb heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions is also reeling from opposition from Democrats from coal-producing regions and states with concentrations of heavy industry. Under cap-and-trade, the government would auction permits to emit heat-trapping gases, with the costs being passed on to consumers via higher gasoline and electric bills.
Also new in Obama's budget details are several tax "loophole" closures and increased IRS tax compliance efforts to raise $58 billion over the next decade to help finance his health care measure. The money would make up for revenue losses stemming from lower-than-hoped estimates for his proposal to limit wealthier people's ability to maximize their itemized deductions.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090512/D984FCB80.html

Baxter pharmaceutical sent weaponized live H5N1 avian flu virus to eighteen countries
WHAT TO EXPECT, MEANDERING SPECULATIONS
by Alan Stang May 1, 2009 NewsWithViews.com
For years, I have been speculating about the weapon the conspiracy for world government would use to precipitate the panic that would cause America to demand its own enslavement. When the conspiracy launched the present financial debacle, I thought the question had been answered. As obvious as it was, it had never occurred to me that the conspiracy would choose two such weapons to work in tandem.
But maybe it has. Will they finally succeed in launching the deadly pandemic that has fizzled in several attempts? A pandemic offers many unique elements. When you drop bombs on people, they know they are being attacked. Also, bombs don’t kill everyone. But when you launch a weaponized pandemic, people don’t know that for sure. Sickness happens – even pandemics happen – without criminal encouragement. The Black Death happened by itself. And a pandemic involves everyone.
Imagine people broke and homeless now facing a deadly disease. It is now possible that the Communists who control the Executive Branch may be deliberately trying to provoke a massive, popular reaction they can use to justify martial law and the concentration camps that would be part of it. In this case, they would call it “quarantine,” and uninfected Americans, worried about their children, would applaud when the government puts the sick on the bus.
The program would include vaccinations, which would include the usual poisons. Remember that the 1976 version of the swine flu vaccination killed more people than the disease itself. Recently, the Baxter pharmaceutical company “accidentally” sent weaponized deadly, live H5N1 avian flu virus to eighteen countries, an “accident” that is impossible and was discovered only by a genuine accident. Had it been injected into humans in all those countries, there would have been an instant pandemic for sure. Czech newspapers were talking conspiracy. Now comes word that Baxter will make the vaccine to fight the Mexican flu. What? Yes.
Health Ranger Mike Adams speculates that “for this to have been a natural combination of viral fragments, it means an infected bird from North America would have had to infect pigs in Europe, then be re-infected by those same pigs with an unlikely cross-species mutation that allowed the bird to carry it again, then that bird would have had to fly to Asia and infect pigs there, and those Asian pigs then mutated the virus once again (while preserving the European swine and bird flu elements) to become human transmittable, and then a human would have had to catch that virus from the Asian pigs –in Mexico! – and spread it to others.” Again, this is just one of many possible speculations.
Meanwhile, we have an affirmative action pretend “President” who almost blatantly hates the system he governs. Has there ever been such a critter in world history? Even psychotic exterminators like Stalin, Castro, Hitler and Mao professed to love the countries they governed. But Mr. Big Ears delights in telling dictators who want to destroy us how criminal we are.
The Declaration of Independence is the nation’s birth certificate. It can never be revoked. It says that whenever a government becomes oppressive, “destructive” of the people’s rights, they have the right to “alter or abolish it.” President Tom Jefferson says that every generation the tree of liberty must be altered with the “blood of patriots and tyrants.” Why would there be blood? Because governments don’t want to be abolished. They worship the power and lust for more.
Most of the time, the only way to abolish them is by force. That is why there would be blood. The Declaration says we have that right. President Tom encourages us to use it. Obviously he is talking about usurpation so total that the government is no longer the one the Founding Fathers left us but a totalitarian perversion. In such a case, he says, it is not only the people’s right to throw off such government; it is their duty.
We are very close to that situation now. Is that why people have bought every last round of ammunition in the country and then some? If Americans do as the President suggests, there would be blood, much blood, and death. Are they mentally prepared for that? Are they close to the intolerable desperation in which they have nothing to lose?
Whom would they be shooting at? In the excitement of getting it, I wonder how many people now laden down with ammo have thought about all this. Would they have the heart for it? So far, I have seen no discussion of these historic questions. No one is happier than I am that our people are so heavily armed. Have they taken time to think about the answers?
My hope and my belief are that, after years of exposés about the conspiracy for world government, enough Americans now understand the conspiracy is trying to provoke them to go military – wants them to rebel – providing the government the excuse to suppress them. My prayer is that such a horror never happens.
But we do have the Declaration and we do have authorization, even encouragement, from the President; we do know that political liberty and freedom of speech are being squelched and that we are moving into full blown totalitarian socialist dictatorship. Permanent cancellation of elections would not necessarily be a clue. Stalin had elections. They allow the people to vent. He was always “elected.”
Listening and reading about what could happen, I see a picture emerge. By the way, remember that I do not propose anything. I merely convey what I hear. In fact, I fervently hope none of this comes to pass. I am talking about the people DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, the Arizona bull dyke, is afraid of; the veterans she fears could become terrorists and who know how to do things. I am listening to them.
Of course the real terrorists are the communazis who run our government and who already lay a heavy hand on the people’s necks. Remember that Lenin created modern terrorism: “Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands. . . .” Felix Dzerzhinsky, his secret police chief, said: “We stand for organized terror. . . .” Terror to Lenin did not mean people rising up against the government. It meant government terrorizing people.
I believe there will be a series of incidents. The psychological pressure cooker artificially created on both sides is already too great to contain. As the Seventh Avenue girdle manufacturer once put it, “Something’s got to give.” The danger is that these isolated incidents could get out of control.
Happily, I do not believe that danger is great. Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee should be forgiven for not recognizing soon enough that they faced satanic Communist monsters. Had they known in time, Jackson could perhaps have followed the fleeing Yankees all the way in to Washington after first Manassas, arrested our first Communist President and restored the Union. Lee said after Appomattox that had he known what he confronted soon enough, he would have fought to the last man.
But by now, after more than a century of Communism, after decades of alarms by a small band of tireless watchmen on the walls, I believe this generation of patriots is too knowledgeable to commit suicide by confronting a U.S. military liberated from the restraints of posse comitatus and persuaded by Napolitano that the patriots are “terrorists.” In lieu of such suicide, alternate scenarios are emerging.
One of the strangest posits a scenario in which the administration now is openly Nazi, denying the fundamental rights the Constitution guarantees. Elections are Stalinist charades. Police state controls make rebellion impossible. The judicious period of sober observation President Tom says must pass before a decision is made to “alter or abolish” a government has long since expired.
Suddenly, according to this scenario, the perpetrators begin to disappear. One by one by one, they vanish. There would be no shooting, no violence. One day they would be there, whistling while they work, reveling in confiscation of the people’s wealth, in loading people onto trucks, etc.; the next day they would not.
Of course, the men I hear talking do not mean people like affirmative action pretend “President” Mr. Big Ears. All Americans are united in the fervent hope that the Secret Service will keep him safe; the Obamatrons because they are morons who believe he is the One, the patriots because they want to see him humiliated and imprisoned for his crimes.
The same thing would apply to people like enemy alien chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, “the hemorrhoid.” Patriots want him safe for the same reason and he is no doubt too hard to reach, anyway. So, no, the scuttlebutt is not about Rahm. It is about the good folks who must leave the protected federal enclave to implement federal policy, not the police but, rather, the low- to mid-level people who do the confiscating, the speechmaking, the inspecting, the intimidating, etc.
Certainly one thing that inspires uncontrollable fear is uncertainty. Why did So-and-So at the next desk or in the next office disappear? People disappear for many reasons every day. Most of them have not been kidnapped. Maybe they were just fed up. Maybe they took the money and are sitting on a beach in Cancun, soaking up the flu. Maybe next week they will show up. In this case, there are no demands. There is no ransom. There are no anguished telephone calls. There is nothing for Jack Bauer and his loyal band of techies to investigate.
However true that is, the scenario says mere not knowing would inspire panic. So-and-So left his office and never came back. Is he in the Twilight Zone? What would happen were I to go up into the hills to inspect? The famous quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn would not apply. There would be no bloody corpses, no heads beaten in beneath the stairs. It would be something even more terrifying, more eerie: nothing. It could disrupt the smooth functioning of government, but there would be nothing for the government to attack.
Of course, all of this is mere chatter, just one of the crazy ideas floating in the ether, blowin’ in the wind. Let us devoutly hope it turns out to be nothing.
http://frc4u.org/phpbb/index.php?topic=1290.0;topicseen